In general, a direct advertising such as a commercial film (CF) and a print advertising has been introduced via mass media. According to the direct advertising, information on products can be directly sent to consumers in concrete, but unwelcome attention of a user may be easily derived as well.
Contrary to the direct advertising, an indirect advertising is a marketing scheme of indirectly advertising products by exposing the products in dramas and films. The indirect advertising helps inform the public of the products less negatively than the direct advertising, but it fails to provide concrete information on the products. Accordingly, the desired end of the indirect advertising could be achieved only in case the consumers who recognize the products included in the dramas or the films search concrete information on the products in an aggressive way.
Recently, the huge leap forward in communication and broadcasting technology made possible by the advent of interactive television and the rapid spread of Internet has converged the direct and the indirect advertising by breaking down the wall therebetween, resulting in a new type of advertising. For example, Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) may provide detailed information on specific brand-name clothes if a viewer indicates the specific brand-name clothes which a performer appearing on a television screen wears by using a pointing device such as a mouse, a keyboard, a keypad and so forth, while the viewer is watching IPTV.
In this regard, a conventional method is disclosed in Korean Patent Application No. 10-2005-0057301 filed on Jun. 29, 2005 (Korea Patent No. 10-2007-0715598 dated Apr. 30, 2007) by SK Telecom, entitled “Method and System for Providing Extra Broadcasting Information Using Object Segmentation”. Herein, disclosed is a terminal which receives information on a broadcast and information on a time and a region when and where objects included in the broadcast are outputted through a monitor, and then obtains detailed information on a specific object by using information on the time and the region at which the specific object is outputted on the monitor, if a user selects the specific object while watching the broadcast.